The core idea behind Real World Web Services is simple: after years of hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the answers Real World Web Services delivers. It's a field guide to the wild and wooly world of non-trivial deployed web services.The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their web service deployments: for example, eBay processes over a billion web service requests a month!The author focuses on building 8 fully worked out example web applications that incorporate the best web services available today. The book thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of topics of interest-by integrating APIs from popular websites most people are already familiar with.For each example application, the author provides a thorough overview, architecture, and full working code examples.This book doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication via Internet protocols. As you ll see, this includes everything from sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of SOAP and various vendor SDKs.

Will Iverson

Will Iverson has been working in the computer & information technology field professionally since 1990. His diverse background includes developing statistical applications for use analyzing data from the NASA Space Shuttle, product management for Apple Computer, developer relations for Symantec's VisualCaf, running an independent J2EE consulting company, and now helping build BEA's dev2dev developer web site. Will lives in Union City, California.

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Real World Web Services is a domestic pigeon (Columba livia). There are more than 150 breeds of domestic pigeon, in a variety of sizes, colors, and patterns. The typical domestic pigeon is distinguished by its blue and gray plumage. As adults, domestic pigeons are approximately 12 to 14 inches long and can weigh up to 3.5 pounds. Their traditional diet consists primarily of seeds and whole grains,and they can travel far from their nest to locate food. Domestic pigeons reach sexual maturity at five to seven months of age. They mate throughout the year but predominantly in the summer months. The female pigeon lays two eggs each mating cycle, and the male and female birds take turns sitting on the eggs to incubate them until they hatch.The domestic pigeon is thought to be the first bird tamed by humans. The first domestic pigeons were bred about 6,000 years ago from the rock pigeon, which lived in the wild in Europe, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. The domestic pigeon was first brought to North America in the early 1600s. Today, American domestic pigeons thrive in urban areas, where they have become comfortable amid the bustle and noise of city life and have adapted their diet to survive on leftover scraps of human food.One of the most famous breeds of domestic pigeon is the carrier pigeon. Bred for the pigeon's exceptional homing abilities, the carrier pigeon has been used since ancient times to transmit written messages fastened to its body. When dispatched, the carrier pigeon can travel at a speed of 45 miles per hour, and despite traversing extremely long distances, it instinctively returns to its home coop. During World Wars I and II, carrier pigeons saved hundreds of human lives, intrepidly flying through combat zones to deliver crucial messages at times when radio transmissions weren't feasible. Mary Anne Weeks Mayo was the production editor and copyeditor, and Sarah Sherman was the proofreader for Real World Web Services. Sanders Kleinfeld, Emily Quill, and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Mary Agner provided production assistance. John Bickelhaupt wrote the index.Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Clay Fernald produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.Melanie Wang designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. This book was converted by Julie Hawks to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Sanders Kleinfeld.

You would like to concretely jump into the web services movement but all you can find are the same old books with invariably repetitive and boring toy examples, such as the infamous StockQuote and Wheater web services. Don't look any further and grab yourself a copy of this book. Will Iverson takes a significantly different approach and shows you how to build concrete web services applications by leveraging existing web services APIs provided by important industry actors, such as, Amazon, Google, eBay, Gracenote (CDDB), FedEx, PayPal, Interfax, etc.

What's more, the author does not limit himself to presenting dry facts about how to work with those web services. Instead, he elegantly demonstrates how to compose them in order to create competitive analysis, list auctions and estimate shipping costs, integrate billing with faxing technologies, syndicate searches, aggregate news from different sources using Quartz and RSS, build a custom CD catalog, dig out and deliver hot news, automatically create daily discussions on Blogger and LiveJournal, and much more.

Basically, this book provides exactly what is often missing from other tomes while managing at the same time to stay extremely simple and straightforward, yet very complete and accurate. I would definitely advise it to any Java developer who is eager to start writing effective and working web services code.